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2 weeks ago

Big 12 M5: 01.10.14 Edition

It’s been a big week for Kansas State‘s Marcus Foster:the guard won Big 12 Newcomer of the Week honors and CBSSports.com named him National Freshman of the Week. Now The Wichita Eagle has details on Foster’s high school career at Hirschi High in Wichita Falls, Texas. He played all five positions and helped Hirschi to an appearance in the state quarterfinals in his junior year. There, his recruiting stock rose quickly. Foster held scholarship offers from Kansas State, Creighton, Texas, Baylor and Colorado among others. In the summer before his senior year, Foster gained a lot of weight. He appeared slow in his AAU games and those who offered him retracted their scholarships save for Creighton and Kansas State. That drove Foster to get back into shape and have a Parade All-American season before deciding to play college ball for the Wildcats. It’s a fascinating story that also makes you think twice about recruiting services. Talent is everywhere, even if they aren’t ranked on a list.

As we enter the first weekend in which everyone has entered conference play, CBSSports.com released their list of top 30 conference games to watch. Included are five Big 12 match-ups: both Kansas-Oklahoma State games, Kansas-Iowa State, Iowa State-Oklahoma State and Iowa State-Baylor. There are other intriguing Big 12 games that could have made the list, but you have to understand that there are games from nine other leagues that make up the 30. If anything, five of 30 ain’t too shabby for the Big 12.

Kansas is planning on building a brand new apartment complex that would serve men’s and women’s basketball student-athletes. The complex would be similar to Kentucky’s Wildcat Coal Lodge, completed in 2012, in both amenities and finances. The projected cost for the complex is $17.5 million and it would also accommodate 34 students who are non-athletes, in compliance with NCAA bylaws. “We have one of the very elite basketball programs in the country, and we want to do everything we can to stay there,” Kansas associate athletic director Jim Marchiony told the Kansas City Star. “Not only that, we need to, and housing is part of that.” I guess it is, to keep up with the Joneses’, but you were able to get Andrew Wiggins with what you have now. So yeah.

Wednesday’s seemed like a breakthrough game for the entire Kansas team with Wayne Selden have a career night. The same could be said for backup point guard Conner Frankamp. He came into Wednesday’s game on an eight game scoreless streak, three of those being games where Frankamp didn’t see any playing time. He checked in against the Sooners and scored five points in 13 minutes which doesn’t seem like much at first glance. But those five points came within the last 2:09 of the first half which helped turn a deficit into a halftime lead for the Jayhawks. Kansas wouldn’t trail for the remainder of the game. Sometimes confidence is all a player needs to perform and Frankamp appears to have it now.

More bad news to report for West Virginia’s basketball team: Bob Huggins announced the appeal for Jonathan Holton to play this season was denied by the NCAA on Thursday. Holton, who previously played at Rhode Island and later Palm Beach State Community College, would have been an immediate contributor for the Mountianeers this season. Holton averaged 17.5 points and 14.1 rebounds for Palm Beach State CC who went 29-3 last year. The NCAA said that Holton will have two years of eligibility remaining, starting with the 2014-15 season.